The move from the institutionalised certainty of school into the increasingly uncertain world of work has become a problematic one for many young people in Bauman’s world of liquid modernity. This is heightened for those working-class kids who are largely denied the traditional routes into adulthood of preceding generations. It is even more acute in a post-industrial northern English town struggling to reinvent itself in the face of over three decades of industrial decay. Like almost all young adults in their late teens and early twenties, Danny, at 19, remained living with his parents in their home on a former council estate. The estate had been constructed on the fringes of the town in the 1950s in order to provide new housing for those dwelling in cramped and bomb-damaged conditions in the inner city. It also provided employment for the wartime heroes who returned from the battlefield to the austere Britain of the late 1940's and '50s.

Once the square was the vital organ of the City, its very essence and core for the harmony and interaction between citizens. However, in the modern city, the square has been taken over by the consumerist influence of the market, transforming its core into a place no longer dedicated to the exchange of ideas and ideals, but of consumer goods. Shops, entertainments, transports work tirelessly - bright, active, welcoming and un-resting - offering citizens and visitors the uninterrupted fulfilment of wishes and desires, with an overwhelming assault of surprises, shocks, sales, offers, emotions. Thus metropolitan reality, more progressive than ever, was morphed into a cold, hyper-individualistic, profoundly blasé attitude, where all social interactions and relationships are reduced to simple monetary exchanges. Urban spaces turn into simple areas of passage, resulting in a deep de-individuation and alienation from the surrounding privatized and highly-monitored environment, one that is filled with prohibitory signs and regulations, to which no-one relates to nor feels respect, and one that, without continuous monitoring, turns inevitably to decay and deterioration. Nonetheless there are alternatives: contexts where the energy and dynamism of the citizens is not wasted in consumption but creates instead an environment of interaction, frequency of the square, participative congregation, and an active, natural monitoring and care of common environmental spaces, beyond the commonplace of bivouac and degradation. One of these alternatives is represented by the practice of Parkour.

In Ireland, a focus on punishment and control among politicians and administrators over the past two decades has left us with a prison system that is a morass. Our prison population is now double what it was in 1995, going from just over 2,000 to about 4,000. Most Irish prisons are too large, overcrowded and dysfunctional; they are very costly warehouses of unacceptable conditions. One would have expected the Strategic Review of Penal Policy (Department of Justice and Equality, 2014)[1], which was launched in September by Minister Frances Fitzgerald, to face up to such issues. This, however, has not happened.

“People spit in my face for being Muslim” was a comment made during this research by an Irish Muslim man. “Muhammed is dead" and "go back to your country” were slurs shouted at a Malaysian Muslim girl. These comments in isolation are just two instances of Islamophobia, or as I prefer to call it, anti-Muslim racism; as narrated by people who participated in the study discussed here. In themselves, of course they hardly constitute an evidence base, but the findings presented below offer more insight into hostility towards Muslims in Ireland than the Irish State has on record. As it stands today, the Irish State is blind to anti-Muslim racism as it does not systematically collect data on this phenomenon as a distinct manifestation of racist activity (see, for example, Office for the Promotion of Migrant Integration 2014). Yet as will be demonstrated, there is no question that anti-Muslim racism is a reality for Muslim men, women and children in Ireland.

‘War’: for years various American administrations have claimed to have waged it on their own people, all in the name of eradicating the evil and menace to society that is drugs. In 1914 Congress passed the Harrison Tax Act which was used to restrict the sale of heroin. Up until that moment the drugs market had gone mostly unregulated and this can be seen as the opening salvo in what would eventually evolve into a full-scale ‘war on drugs’. Now in this the centenary year of the start of the fight against drugs in America, it still seems that no end is in sight. The purpose of this article will be to show how the 'war on drugs' has been turned into a political weapon with which to legitimate the vast expansion of domestic state power. I will argue that the media has been used to create such a fear and panic within the majority of its citizens that the country has now, in the name of this war, gutted its own fourth amendment and introduced racially based profiling and ‘stop and frisk’ police tactics with the most minimal cause. Yet this ‘war’ still seems to be producing no end or even progress.